‘I just feel so cheated,’ Tasha was saying. ‘Because every year after sports day they had pizza, like every year, and then our year we just have chips and Coke. Literally like a single chip each. And you expect you’re going to have pizza, you know?’
‘I know, it’s so cheap,’ said the girl. ‘It’s like, hey, we’re saving five cents, we’re so awesome!’
‘To me it’s like a betrayal,’ said Lauren.
Starbucks really was giving away mochaccinos, and the lineup stretched halfway down the block, some of the other girls from their own school, and kids from the local high school in jeans and T-shirts, their coats slumping off their shoulders. The girl checked her reflection in the glass door, wondering fretfully if she had gained more weight, if there was a visible roll of fat at her waist. Joining the wave of young bodies, pushing and giggling. Contact in the crowd between hips, legs, the bare skin of a stranger’s arm, and she slid into the high bright relief of noise.
‘I so need caffeine right now,’ said Tasha. ‘Or I’m physically dying.’ They reached the counter, and the desperate boy pushed forward another half-dozen cups. Each of them grabbed one, pressing through the aisle towards the exit, sipping the foaming liquid, bitter and milky. Aware of the public school boys, watching them from under their messy bangs. She met the eyes of one boy, a nice-looking boy, someone she would probably never see again, and his look slid down her.
When they walked east along St. Clair they had become a group of five, Megan and Zoe joining them as well.
‘I have to write an assignment about Guinevere,’ moaned Zoe. ‘Who I just hate so much. Did you read it? She’s so unloyal. She’s like this crazy old bipolar bitch.’
‘We’re not doing that one, though, we’re doing that other one.’
‘Well, God, you’re so lucky. It’s like a million pages of poetry. It’s diseased, if you want to know.’
‘Is your class raising money for the global, the African thing?’
‘I think. But I’m not sure what we’re doing yet.’
The girl adjusted the gold barrettes in her hair with one hand, rolled up her skirt so that it brushed high on her legs, her bare skin goosebumped with cold, thinking about the boy from the public school, with a vague distaste and a wish that he would follow them. He might have been a nice boy.
‘What I think, we need to have a slave auction,’ Zoe was saying. ‘Because it’s so the best kind of fundraiser.’
‘We should make the teachers be the slaves,’ said Megan, giggling. ‘We should make Mr. Sondstrom be a slave. We so should.’
The girl frowned and wiped mochaccino from her pink lips, swallowing against the heat in her throat. ‘Mr. Sondstrom’s too gross to be a slave even,’ she said. Megan didn’t know. It wasn’t her fault. ‘He’s just a squid. Sid the Squid.’
‘Totally,’ said Lauren, bumping her shoulder supportively. The girl finished her mochaccino, crushed the paper cup in her hand.
Turning off St. Clair, they walked past the frost-brown gardens of the residential streets, wet leaves in the gutters, heading towards Chorley Park, where there were boys playing soccer sometimes, or sometimes they would just sit on the benches and talk, their park, their place.
‘But I’m going to the Eaton Centre later on,’ said Megan. ‘I need a new pair of shoes so bad. It’s a critical situation.’
‘You know the place called Rebels? They have the best shoes.’
‘Megan buys her shoes at Sears,’ said Tasha.
‘I do not, you liar.’ Megan, a year younger than the others, her position in the group subject to question.
‘You totally do.’
‘Oh God,’ Zoe broke in, laughing nervously. ‘I have to tell you about my brother. I have to tell you about my psycho brother, okay? I mean, he’s got all these, like, warfare scenes in his bedroom, like, the little guys with their spears and shit. Which is spaz enough, right? But he’s now he’s like, okay, it’s, like, this warfare is all over, it’s modern times, and I’m going to do a terror gas attack, and kill them all. And I’m like, God! They’re a bunch of toys! But he’s, no, I’m gonna make a poison chemical from like Clorox and bleach and I’m gonna kill everybody, and I’m like, it’s a toy, Jordan, you mutant.’
‘God,’ said the girl, rolling her eyes. ‘That is so random.’
‘’Cause he’s like, it happened in, in the Japan subway, and all these people died, so he’s like, I can totally do this at home.’
‘What happened in Japan?’ asked Tasha, her eyebrows pinched.
Zoe shrugged. ‘I dunno. Terrorists or whatever. Jordan’s like Mutato-Boy, so, I mean, what does he know about it? I bet he dreamed the whole thing.’
‘Would you believe,’ said the girl, ‘when I was a kid I was in that big subway crash at Dupont? Oh God, that was so scary.’
‘Oh my God! You were really?’ gasped Lauren, and the girl’s face shone with gratified horror.
‘I totally was,’ she said. ‘I nearly died.’
‘Oh my God! That must have been so traumatic!’
‘Seriously,’ said the girl; though in truth her memories were vague, barely existing at all. There had been smoke, at some point – when she was being taken out of the car, there had been smoke. Before that she had been pressed against her mother, and there was some other woman pushing against her from the other side, and that woman was wearing too much perfume, floral, clotting in her throat. The lights had gone out.
‘No, but I think monkeys are more morally superior than people,’ Zoe was saying. ‘Because monkeys don’t use, like, landmines and stuff, do they?’
‘Unless they were really horrible monkeys,’ said Tasha, and then they were at the park.
‘Well,’ said Lauren. ‘This is pretty random.’
And what happened in the green space of the park was something the girl didn’t much want to talk about.
I
He knew how it would go, Alex told himself as he walked up Bathurst Street. They would start out tentative and hopeful, full of kind feelings about the past. They would talk for a while about safe and neutral memories, about shared acquaintances, and then slowly the evening would shrivel into the dry, polite awareness that they had nothing in common anymore, maybe never had. It might be embarrassing and a bit sad, but they would walk away from it unharmed, freed from certain things. That was the way these things went.
He knew, in fact, not much about her. Once he had thought that he wanted to know her, wanted nothing more in the world, but it had never been true; whatever he had thought he felt, Susie had finally been not much more than a blank screen for his own longings. And he, presumably, had been the same for her, had acquired what identity he had from being simply not Chris.
BIRD FLU EPIDEMIC COULD KILL MILLIONS, said a headline in a newspaper box. Maybe this would replace the fainting girls, then; that would be a relief. He bent down, glancing at a photograph of the mass extermination of chickens in Hong Kong. The story stressed that the world was overdue for an epidemic. The virus biding its time, waiting to make a grand appearance.
She was in the restaurant already when he arrived, but she stood up from the table as he